It’s not just the Christmas season that seems to start earlier each year. The year-in-review season is on its way to a November launch, too. We hold out as long as possible, to give the full 12 months our consideration, but we did spend part of last week assessing the states of the PS4, Xbox One and Wii U in 2015. Those were among the best pieces we ran last week. Here are some others:
- Multiplayer-Only Games Shouldn’t Cost $60 - A persuasive argument (as was this bit of Yakuza advocacy )
- How One Man Beat Fallout 3 On Hard Mode Without Ever Healing - I never get tired of reading about this guy’s exploits.
- The New Need For Speed Is So Much Better Now - A perfect example of the value of focusing on post-release gaming coverage
- It Must Suck To Work For Konami U.S. Right Now - Some needed empathy (You’ll find more of the week’s interesting Konami/Kojima-related coverage here and here).
- I Bought An Expensive-Ass PC Gaming Monitor And It’s Really Good - Solid shopping advice with all the expertise and humor to decide whether it’s really worth it.
I was also happy to see more additions to our long-term coverage of Kickstarter fiascoes and YouTube channel-access shenanigans.
Best headline: Star Wars Battlefront In 4k Is Just Hahaha Who Can Even Run This
Best GIF (via this post):
I can’t write about the week that was without also noting the contributions of Yannick LeJacq, who joined us in 2014 and for the past year forged our site’s coverage of MOBAs. We parted ways with Yannick last week, but I wish him the best in what surely will be a bright future.
Some readers have asked me if we’re getting out of covering MOBAs or even out of covering eSports. No, though you’ll see less of the former in the near term. There are some gaming genres or beats, such as sports gaming, that Kotaku doesn’t cover in-depth, because we don’t have the staff expertise to do them justice. Other beats, such as shooters, RPGs, Steam or Nintendo, we’re doing just fine. I intend for MOBAs to be part of that latter grouping. We’ve also taken many cracks at covering the breadth of eSports over the years—from fighting tournaments, StarCraft competitions, MOBA matches, shooter battles, and more. Esports have always been challenging for a site like ours to cover, given the time commitment it takes to follow all the top competitions, but we’ll continue to chase the perfect way to cover them (I have some ideas on how best to do it, but I can’t give all the secrets away!).
Got thoughts about what we published last week or about stories you’d like to see on the site? Let me know.
To contact the author of this post, write to stephentotilo@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter @stephentotilo.
Top image from Luke’s post about a different way to look at Fallout 4, image via yttriumtyclief